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11.02.2011

Easy No-Sew Circus Jacket

The Big Top took over my office this year for Halloween. No really, we are crazy. You've never seen cubes transformed into a giant tented circus land like this. Last year was fairytales (I was Peter Pan), this year was Circus. My "act" for the big show was Tightrope Walker (not to be confused with street-walker... you might be inclined to lean towards option 2 when you see the amount of makeup on my face). I remodeled my cube into a circus tent ala lots of color toner, hot glue, streamers, and a rope from Lowes. See? Yes, that is my cubicle.

So the cube is done.... what does a tightrope walker wear? Probably spandex, but since body-clinging, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination wear is not what I'd like my co-workers to know about me, I went for vintage tightrope walker. After some Googling, I made up my mind that a tutu and parasol were the way to go. First stop, Goodwill with my friend Christy from Through My Looking Glass. She actually found the tutu/shirt combo I ended up wearing and highly suggested I buy. Great idea... $4.99 later, it was mine. Just one problem, it had spaghetti straps. I probably could have gotten away with it for Halloween... but still, it's work and I wanted to be a little more covered. That's when I decided to make a jacket. Here's what I did.

I started with a long sleeve T-shirt in my closet.

Then I bought some shiny trim from Walmart. (PS. I only ended up using the braided trim)

Next, I cut the shirt like this.

And then, I eyeballed and cut some rounded edges on the front.

Then I started hot glueing my trim. I started at the collar and worked my way down the front of the shirt/jacket first. Keep going around the back and back up the front of the other side, ending at the collar again. If you run out of trim, just start a new band right where the other one ran out. You can't even tell on mine where the trim starts and stops.

Then I started around the collar. (oh yes, that glue gun has been well used)

After finishing the collar, I had a tiny piece of braided trim left. I unbraided it and used the 3 strips to make loops on the front. I just hot glued those suckers right in place too. The last thing I did was take two silver buttons off my tutu and glued them to the top... you can see them in the next pics.

And there I am in all my Tightrope Walker glory.

Yup, added leggings too. Tulle is quite see through ya know.

And since I was going for a vintage look, I had some fun with Photobooth and took some vintage-style pictures.

Nice looking jacket, eh?

And so you know I'm not the lone crazy woman dressing up at work, here's a picture of our entire department.